August Monthly Gathering

August Monthly Gathering

by Rafael Jegundo -

Overview

Like last month’s, August’s MG was focused on the different changes that we are doing in the company. As you read in the last blog post, we changed the way we work on our products and also the way we approach the market. Keeping in line with these changes, this month we talked about what we need to improve as a company.

We identified three things that we need to improve on to follow our improvement path: product sales, craftsmanship, and cash-flow.

  • Product team: validate, design, build for us and our clients;
  • Craftsmanship: have T-shaped experts in all the main areas;
  • Cash-flow: to invest in our product and our people.

Product team is our new positioning that aims to showcase ourselves as more than a team of developers and designers. With a “Product Team-as-a-service”, we will help our clients through all the stages in the process of idealizing, designing, building and executing their product. Internally, we will use the Product Cycle framework to validate and ship our products faster.

Craftsmanship is probably one of the things we talk more in our monthly meetings, we believe this is the way to make us a better team. Having T-shaped people who are experts some areas with an understanding in all domains will help each one of us improve and keep learning new things using our Investment Time. We also want to bring new people to the team while ensuring that hiring makes the team better, not just larger.

Cash-flow is our key financial indicator as the main enabler to invest and grow the company in value. We have to hustle to find new clients and bring home the tofu (we are vegan-friendly) creating value for our clients. With a comfortable cash-flow, we will be able to invest more in our products and people.

To help hustlers have more time to… well, hustle, we now appointed ambassadors for each consulting team that are responsible for ensuring that everything is organized and up to date.

Consulting

Billables wise, the past month was the poorest month of the year, with only 46k€ of billables of the 72k€ goal we traced. This is mostly because of a few projects ending, and because of we have only acquired one project that fits the profile of what we want to be developing from now on.

This is not good and we should not be happy with it.

Again, the biggest bottleneck sits in the type of projects we have been able to acquire this last trimester: we acquired 5 projects, but only one above the 20k€ value. We have some promising leads in the pipeline, but we’ve not been able to close them yet.

In terms of the number of projects, we haven’t reached the goal of 14 projects (8 closed). That’s because we acquired some new projects and are still closing others.

We have added new indicators for the goals, more focused on each tribe (Consulting and Hustle).

Billables are now the main indicator for Consulting, so everyone will be focused on that metric each month:

  • July: 46k€
  • August: 56K€ projected, we think we can achieve > 61K€

Consulting goals for September and onwards will be updated and validated with project ambassadors, but we’ll be pushing them and hustling to ensure all months from September on out are above 70K€.

Our 3 months average cash-burn is at 56K€/month.

Hustle goals have also been updated for the 3rd trimester to reflect these new changes:

  • 16 qualified deals until the end of Quarter: Divided between high paid work (cash) and product sales (product & strategy).
  • Make 2 product sales (where we have an active role on the non-technical side).
  • Validate product sales in PT, double down in London by September.

We will keep in search mode for a reliable and recurrent source of qualified leads, that can on one side challenge our technical skills but also give us good money to keep investing in our products.

This is hard, but we believe it is a matter of time and work until we make the jump. As we have all seen during these last weeks, we have the right people to do it!
We will be focused on getting 2 qualified leads a week.

Product Cycles

As you may have seen in our previews blog post, we are changing our product development to a 6-week product cycle framework. Learn a bit more about the projects before this first cycle ends.

DigitalBird

As a digital nomad traveling solo (or not) you always try to find online a place to sleep, work, eat and things to do. However, most of the time this is difficult to find or you just get tourist things that don't show you the truth of local. Digital Bird provides you everything you need to prosper as digital nomad where you experiment the best of what the city has to offer curated or provide by locals for a fixed amount per day. Right now we are looking for our first digital nomads who would like to use our product.
Digital Bird's landing page

Betterdesign

After finding an opportunity to co-found a newly found website (BetterDesign), aiming to solve the same questions as a Whitesmith's investment-time project did (image-grid), we talked to the owner. Since BetterDesign already addresses the issue image-grid was trying to solve (the problem regarding the easy, errorless comparison/sharing of images). Although we collaborated with betterdesign's team we will not give continuity to the project.
Better Design's website

TickTap

TickTap is an app for musicians and music lovers to train their rhythm, while also having fun. Built with React Native, we have almost finished the app and are giving it the last front-end touches.
TickTap's demo

TeamedIn

Teams usually are more efficient than a single person. Gathering elements that function perfectly as a team can be a very time-consuming task and usually exhaust human resources. Our goal was to make this process effortless! How? Teamedin is a social network that gathers the best product teams and recruiters, hence connecting people and companies. Contrary to other platforms, Teamedin isn’t focusing on matchmaking, we focus on providing teams and startups with the best, pragmatic way to meet new talents and ideas.

What do you think? Don't forget to check out each link and give us some feedback.

Marketing

We still have a lot of blog posts in progress that wasn't launched, so we didn't reach our goals in this matter.

Also, we are trying different approaches to attract clients, and since we are not counting the contacts that come from old/current clients, our inbound strategy has been slower.

The results for July were:

  • 4/6 blog posts
  • 0/2 inbound contacts

Goals for August:

  • 6 blog posts
  • 3 inbound contacts

During August, we will invest more in our inbound strategy and we will also start working in our meet up in a new city! Watch out for updates on our social media.


See you in September

We would love to know your thoughts about our monthly reports. What else would you like us to cover? Or what can we share that would be helpful for you? Feel free to share any thoughts or questions on twitter!

Check out the posts of the past months: July
June
May
April
March
February
January part 1 & 2 November part 1 & 2

#people-culture

Rafael Jegundo

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